Some interesting responses to Mike’s situation, and my defense of him yesterday. I didn’t mean to have any more to say, but I fear I do.
Gary’s response clarified something in my head: there is a difference between presenting a partial self to the world and presenting a false self. Yes, yes, all presented selves are necessarily both false and partial; I know. I also know all about lying by omission. That’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m saying that I think it’s all right not to go certain places, talk about certain things; that doesn’t necessarily create a falsehood. On CavLec you’re not going to hear racy stories of sexual escapades. You’re just not. Sex is a part of my life I deliberately leave unwritten. For other people, it’s work or family. Fine. Note the omission when appropriate, and hold your head up.
(Which is partly by way of encouraging David to blog a bit more. Poor guy, he’s watched me get repeatedly smashed down over things I’ve said the last few years; he’s entitled to be appalled. His response is silence. Mine is transparency. If he can find a place in-between, he’d still have plenty to say.)
The places we don’t go are partly socially constructed. To the extent that some of us break those taboos—Mike with family, me with grad school—we tend to attract attention, notably of a wistful “thanks; wish I dared write about that” sort. There’s a few dissertations to be written on where the boundaries are; I have sort of a sense of them, but my social deafness means that almost anyone probably has a better one.
One of the boundaries I break pretty regularly is the self-esteem boundary (for lack of a better term). All those studies that talk about how the person who looks at herself with rose-colored glasses is healthier, succeeds more—I’ve skimmed descriptions in the media, read a few abstracts. Whatever. I can’t do it. I can’t pump myself up that way. Quite deliberately, with full awareness, I play the fool instead, because I think that more honest and in the long run more useful than the alternatives.
Which is not to say that it’s entirely comfortable in the short run. Poor Hylton emailed me last night to ask whether he’d offended me, after I sniped last night about banana-peel postings. I sniped at Mike today, too, in his comments somewhere, about never letting me live down the sexism series. (That set of posts, incidentally, has proven in hindsight a blunder of calamitous proportions.)
Thing is, all this comes with the territory. You laugh at fools, point at our folly; it’s what fools are for. Sometimes you pity us; sometimes you learn from us. Mostly you’re glad you’re not us, even to despising us. Every once in a while, though, a good fool can make you cringe at your likeness to him.
But a proper fool never, ever, ever bites the hand that points at him in derision. Threatened, he may not threaten; abused, he must not abuse. The Fool may complain, but only to heaven; he may point out the folly of others, but only by mirroring it or making it into a riddle. The Fool goes about his business no matter the consequences. Lear’s Fool disappears; Rosaura’s Clarín dies in a battle he wants no part of, blaming no one but fate, exclaiming ironically that running from death brings death running.
I will try to remember to be a proper fool. It takes practice.
Jonathon defends the exposure of family façades in the name of art. I agree that Mike has a good defense there, but I don’t think it’s the only one he’s got. Wherever there is a façade, there is the other side of the story, someone who doesn’t dare believe the evidence of her senses or his thoughts.
Ripping down the façade gives that person back the world—or at least a chance at constructing one that isn’t false.
I wonder how many other family members Mike’s would-be censor intimidates. I wonder sadly how much is being hidden. I wonder how many family members wander through their lives half-anesthetized, too engaged holding up the façade to build anything more worthwhile.
It would be nice to believe that everyone is strong enough to pierce the masquerades. I know better, having spent much of my life believing a great many stupid and wearying fictions unquestioning. Sometimes, though, all that’s needed is a push of honesty from outside. Like Mike’s. I for one will defend his posts on that basis.
